You know, I was watching a match the other day, and it struck me how massive goalkeepers seem now. Proper giants, most of them. Takes up the whole goal frame just by standing there. It got me thinking, are there any shorter keepers left playing at the top level in England? Like, who’s actually the shortest goalkeeper in the Premier League right now?
So, I Started Digging
Naturally, my first step was just to look it up online. Fired up the computer, typed in the obvious search terms. You get a lot of results, sure, but loads of them are old articles, talking about players from seasons gone by, or even legends from way back. Not quite what I needed for the current season.
I thought, okay, maybe I need to check the official club websites or the Premier League’s own player list. That seemed like a solid plan. I started going through some team rosters, looking at the goalie profiles. They usually list the height, right? Well, yes, they do. But man, there are a lot of keepers when you count the first choice, the backup, maybe even a third-stringer for every club. That’s like 60+ players to check individually. Took a bit of time, clicking through profiles.
I checked a few of the big names first, just out of curiosity. Alisson, Ederson, Onana – all pretty tall lads, as expected. Then I started looking at some of the other clubs. You find lists here and there on fan forums or stat websites, people debating this exact thing. Names get thrown around.
After a fair bit of clicking and reading, one name that kept popping up was Neto over at Bournemouth. He’s listed around 6 foot 1 inch, or 185cm. Now, that’s not tiny by normal standards, obviously, but in the land of goalkeeping giants these days, it puts him on the shorter end of the scale compared to some guys who are 6’5″ or taller.
It’s tricky to be absolutely certain, you know? Teams sometimes register young keepers, or info might not be perfectly updated everywhere the second it changes. But based on the readily available squad info for the main keepers playing regularly or on the bench, Neto seems to be the one most often mentioned as being among the shortest, if not the shortest right now.
It’s funny how the game changes. You used to see more keepers around the six-foot mark, but now they mostly seem to be built like basketball players. Anyway, that was my little investigation for the day. Quite interesting to see how physiques have shifted in that position.
